New Android chief talks Facebook Home, Samsung phones, and OS updates

Sundar Pichai also says Android and Chrome are safe from one another—for now.

An interview with Sundar Pichai over at Wired has settled some questions about suspected Google plans, rivalries, and alliances. Pichai was recently announced as Andy Rubin’s replacement as head of Android, and he expressed cool confidence ahead of Google I/O about the company’s relationships with both Facebook and Samsung. He even felt good about the future of the spotty Android OS update situation.

Tensions between Google and Samsung, the overwhelmingly dominant Android handset manufacturer, are reportedly rising. But Pichai expressed nothing but goodwill toward the company. “We work with them on pretty much almost all our important products,” Pichai said while brandishing his own Samsung Galaxy S 4. “Samsung plays a critical role in helping Android be successful.”

Pichai noted in particular the need for companies that make “innovation in displays [and] in batteries” a priority. His attitude toward Motorola, which Google bought almost two years ago, was more nonchalant: “For the purposes of the Android ecosystem, Motorola is [just another] partner.”

Pichai was similarly benevolent to Facebook, which recently underwent a somewhat tumultuous release of its own Android UI overlay, Facebook Home. “Android was intended to be very customizable. And we welcome innovations,” said Pichai. Pichai said that his opinion differs with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s notion that “people are the center of everything.” But Pichai doesn’t plan to block Facebook or anyone else from trying what Facebook did (catastrophic though it has proved). “We are excited they’ve done good work,” he said.

Improving Android’s end user experience while keeping it open are two goals in conflict, Pichai noted. Google can do only so much with grooming its OS when companies are going to either fork older versions, as is the case with Amazon’s Kindle Fire, or stack proprietary UXes on them, as HTC and Samsung do.

Since the Android OS launched in September 2008, the average interval between a new version debut and the software push to individual phones has stretched to weeks, then months, and sometimes over a year. Regarding OS updates, Pichai said that “it’s early days” for sorting out the problem and the company “needs time to figure out the mechanics, but it’s definitely an area of focus.”

Regarding whether Chrome and Android might unify into one operating system, Pichai was adamant that it's not part of the plan. "We have Android and we have Chrome, and we are not changing course."

Pichai will no doubt make an extended appearance at Google's I/O conference this week. Ars reporters will be on the scene waiting to absorb every bit of Android, Chrome, and Google news, so stay tuned for updates.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

39 Reader Comments

I don't know how well is Chrome OS selling but none of the people i know online and in life hear about Chrome or not interested. I assume is selling very poor. The google's best selling OS is definetely Android.

Keeping Chrome OS separate makes little sense. As it is, it is basically just like Android with 90% of the features deleted. I believe the codebases are separate but that's not important to the consumer. They would be better off killing Chrome and devoting those programmers to improving mouse and large-monitor support in Android.

He even felt good about the future of the spotty Android OS update situation.

I'm sure a lot of executives 'feel good' or 'optimistic' about the future of android updates across carriers... the million-dollar-question is what is he going to do about it? Besides saying "it’s definitely an area of focus"

He even felt good about the future of the spotty Android OS update situation.

I'm sure a lot of executives 'feel good' or 'optimistic' about the future of android updates across carriers... the million-dollar-question is what is he going to do about it? Besides saying "it’s definitely an area of focus"

He's going to fully leverage the synergies they enjoy with their channel partners to cross-pollinate their talent pools, incentivizing them to push the envelope with out-of-the-box thinking tempered by routine touchbasing to keep their eyes on the prize and deliver shareholder value via continuous ideating vis á vis the focus issue of fragmentation.

He's going to fully leverage the synergies they enjoy with their channel partners to cross-pollinate their talent pools, incentivizing them to push the envelope with out-of-the-box thinking tempered by routine touchbasing to keep their eyes on the prize and deliver shareholder value via continuous ideating vis á vis the focus issue of fragmentation.

He even felt good about the future of the spotty Android OS update situation.

I'm sure a lot of executives 'feel good' or 'optimistic' about the future of android updates across carriers... the million-dollar-question is what is he going to do about it? Besides saying "it’s definitely an area of focus"

He's going to fully leverage the synergies they enjoy with their channel partners to cross-pollinate their talent pools, incentivizing them to push the envelope with out-of-the-box thinking tempered by routine touchbasing to keep their eyes on the prize and deliver shareholder value via continuous ideating vis á vis the focus issue of fragmentation.

He even felt good about the future of the spotty Android OS update situation.

I'm sure a lot of executives 'feel good' or 'optimistic' about the future of android updates across carriers... the million-dollar-question is what is he going to do about it? Besides saying "it’s definitely an area of focus"

He's going to fully leverage the synergies they enjoy with their channel partners to cross-pollinate their talent pools, incentivizing them to push the envelope with out-of-the-box thinking tempered by routine touchbasing to keep their eyes on the prize and deliver shareholder value via continuous ideating vis á vis the focus issue of fragmentation.

Chrome OS leaves me scratching my head. I don't understand why it exists as a separate product, instead of as a sub-development off of Android. The latter would seem to allow for a more unified pool of development talent, no?

EDIT: Removed previous joke as I misread Control Group's post somehow. (Whoops!) Thanks to Rene for pointing out my mistake.

He's going to fully leverage the synergies they enjoy with their channel partners to cross-pollinate their talent pools, incentivizing them to push the envelope with out-of-the-box thinking tempered by routine touchbasing to keep their eyes on the prize and deliver shareholder value via continuous ideating vis á vis the focus issue of fragmentation.

^^^

This Good Sir, is some of the finest sarcastic bullshit I've sampled recently.

Regarding whether Chrome and Android might unify into one operating system, Pichai was adamant that it's not part of the plan. "We have Android and we have Chrome, and we are not changing course."

*sad face*I keep wishing they would integrate and have yet to hear a good reason why they don't. Anyone can see from the MS fumbling that integrating tablet features into a keyboard mouse setting are not a match made in heaven, but if anyone could pull it off, its Google.

So I think Ars left out a tiny bit of the context in his Chrome and Android answer:

Quote:

Users care about applications and services they use, not operating systems. Very few people will ask you, “Hey, how come MacBooks are on Mac OS-X and iPhone and iPad are on iOS? Why is this?” They think of Apple as iTunes, iCloud, iPhoto.

Quote:

In the long run, computing itself will dictate the changes. We’re living through a pivotal moment. It’s a world of multiple screens, smart displays, with tons of low-cost computing, with big sensors built into devices. At Google we ask how to bring together something seamless and beautiful and intuitive across all these screens. The picture may look different a year or two from from now, but in the short term, we have Android and we have Chrome, and we are not changing course.

Seems like they want to see if any hardware right around the corner might give Chrome a boost before they kill the experiment.

I don't know how well is Chrome OS selling but none of the people i know online and in life hear about Chrome or not interested. I assume is selling very poor. The google's best selling OS is definetely Android.

Well they don't actually sell Android so Chrome OS baked in is technically the only OS they are "selling" at all.

I like to have Chrome OS for people like my mother, and yes they still exist in the current generation of people, someone who needs something simple and easy to use with the least amount of security issues. She only had to learn the term offline for games she likes to play and was able to use the Chromebook in the hospital recently why she was in a waiting room with no wi-fi. All that needs to be done is go to the Chrome App store and download the things she needs. It was also easy for me to set it up for here and includes many offline features. In the end my reasoning is its easy of use for people like her and the security to protect her from herself. The only thing I cannot stop her from doing but inform her about is phishing especially the social engineering kind.

Don't get me wrong I know Android is capable of all these things but until Google can get better control of the store and its past to recent security issues then Chrome OS is still the better choice.

I don't know how well is Chrome OS selling but none of the people i know online and in life hear about Chrome or not interested. I assume is selling very poor. The google's best selling OS is definetely Android.

Well they don't actually sell Android so Chrome OS baked in is technically the only OS they are "selling" at all.

Every time I hear an article related to the direction of Android, I have to keep asking, "What's in it for Google?"

They mention it less and less because they don't want people to think of Android as separate from their main brand of "Google". The only problem is that the Google brand is now diluted and undefined. What the hell is Google?

Google spends millions on development, infrastructure, maintenance and marketing of Android, and they give it away for free. Even if they chose to licence the technologies it's built upon before they sent it to OEMs and ODMs, it's an absolute money void for them. If Motorola was purchased to guard against mobile technology patents related to Android, then the Android platform has done nothing but lose Google Billions..

Unless it's for the exposure of their ad-based services due to flooding the market with this free OS, to which the customer can chose to use MS or other services on it.

I think they were calculating that they needed to get a part of the mobile search pie and this was the only way they could do it with their business model. Maybe it's paying off for them somehow, but I doubt they've even approached breaking even on what it's cost them. And now that Samsung is going to go Tizen and presumably launch their own cloud based services (making profit), MS is going to be a huge player in the long term (making profit) and Apple will keep chugging away (making asinine profit), I can't see why or how Google should or would keep developing Android. Given all this time and all that market exposure, it's a bit of an embarrassing mobile experience with all the bolt on UI options that drown the user in functionality and uselessness at the same time.

Android puzzles me from a business perspective. Google's lifeline is advertising, is it really paying off for them on Android I wonder. They've never, ever released a statement on how much profit or loss Android generates. It's always lumped in with other metrics to hide from the public how much of a financial burden Android is for them. I presume the search revenue offered by it is off setting the loss a little bit, but who knows. I bet Andy Rubin does.

His attitude toward Motorola, which Google bought almost two years ago, was more nonchalant: “For the purposes of the Android ecosystem, Motorola is [just another] partner.”

Albeit a $12,000,000,000 (give or take) partner with little to show for itself after two years.

It makes me wonder what shareholders think of statements like this, they paid that much money to get what they could have gotten for free by making Motorola a preferred partner or something (or just working with them on making handsets that could actually get updates).

I'm sure the X phone or whatever is in the works and I'm just annoyed because I bought a moto phone hoping for Nexus levels of support (which in hindsight was stupid), but statements like this really should be better thought out.

His attitude toward Motorola, which Google bought almost two years ago, was more nonchalant: “For the purposes of the Android ecosystem, Motorola is [just another] partner.”

Albeit a $12,000,000,000 (give or take) partner with little to show for itself after two years.

It makes me wonder what shareholders think of statements like this, they paid that much money to get what they could have gotten for free by making Motorola a preferred partner or something (or just working with them on making handsets that could actually get updates).

I'm sure the X phone or whatever is in the works and I'm just annoyed because I bought a moto phone hoping for Nexus levels of support (which in hindsight was stupid), but statements like this really should be better thought out.

This is why I have been holding onto my Galaxy Nexus for so much longer. I thought about switching to a Motorola phone but looking at how long it took them to release an update to Jelly Bean on RAZR and its varying versions made me glad I held on to it.

I don't know how well is Chrome OS selling but none of the people i know online and in life hear about Chrome or not interested. I assume is selling very poor. The google's best selling OS is definetely Android.

Well they don't actually sell Android so Chrome OS baked in is technically the only OS they are "selling" at all.

Though only a small sample, on Amazon the 11th best selling item in the computer category was Samsung's Chromebook. No Win8 tablets were to be found on that list.

Android puzzles me from a business perspective. Google's lifeline is advertising, is it really paying off for them on Android I wonder. They've never, ever released a statement on how much profit or loss Android generates. It's always lumped in with other metrics to hide from the public how much of a financial burden Android is for them. I presume the search revenue offered by it is off setting the loss a little bit, but who knows. I bet Andy Rubin does.

Don't forget that Google gets a cut off of sales on the Google Play store, and they are selling (and getting a cut off of) magazines and books and movies there as well, which Apple would not permit them to do on iOS.

Advertising may well be dominating over Google Play revenues today, but Apple makes its money off of the iTunes store, Google is investing well if it can get anything similar.

Keeping Chrome OS separate makes little sense. As it is, it is basically just like Android with 90% of the features deleted. I believe the codebases are separate but that's not important to the consumer. They would be better off killing Chrome and devoting those programmers to improving mouse and large-monitor support in Android.

It does not make sense to you because you are clearly not the target audience. The lack of features in ChromeOS is not an accident, it is the whole goal. By stripping out things like native apps, a bootloader, and hardware initialization you have an extremely lightweight OS. The lack of features gives ChromeOS a level of security, speed, and simplicity that Android can not touch.

If you were to add Android features like native apps to Chrome, you would alienate schools, grandmas (and their tech support grandsons), and enterprise web workstations. Those are the markets that ChromeOS targets and actually does pretty well in. Of course this market is considerably smaller than Android's and ChromeOS has not penetrated as much of it. But, ChromeOS is still a success in its own right. Especially when you consider how many people in the target market were using IE6 before ChromeOS.

Every time I hear an article related to the direction of Android, I have to keep asking, "What's in it for Google?"

Seriously? Apart from the money from the Play Store which must be a pretty penny it gives them huge influence over the vast majority of internet capable devices.

Let's imagine a world without Android where Apple has 60% market share and Windows8 30%. (Or whatever) . Google makes 90% of its money from people using its search and other online services. What if Apple suddenly asks them for a cut of 50% on their ad revenues or it will switch over to Bing. Microsoft will do that anyway. Would pretty much destroy Google in the midterm since people switch over to mobile devices more and more. They would be locked in a smaller and smaller PC environment.

Now with Android the situation is a bit different. They have good control over what happens with Android ( forks like the Kindle don't seem to light the world on fire) and they also created competition to the iPhone that gives options to people. When Apple switches over to non-Google services and they suck ( Maps ) Those users can now switch over to Android devices that are just as good. Gives a strong incentive to the Apples and Microsofts of the world to add Google apps to their environments.

Keeping Chrome OS separate makes little sense. As it is, it is basically just like Android with 90% of the features deleted. I believe the codebases are separate but that's not important to the consumer. They would be better off killing Chrome and devoting those programmers to improving mouse and large-monitor support in Android.

It does not make sense to you because you are clearly not the target audience. The lack of features in ChromeOS is not an accident, it is the whole goal. By stripping out things like native apps, a bootloader, and hardware initialization you have an extremely lightweight OS. The lack of features gives ChromeOS a level of security, speed, and simplicity that Android can not touch.

Awesome an Operating System that has been crippled to become a glorified Browser launch device. Who is the "target audience". I suspect 2 guys in California and one in Washington DC. ChromeOS is the stupidest idea I have heard for a long time and it baffles me totally how long Google is beating this dead horse.

It is clearly a dead idea I am willing to bet the sales of their new high-end Chromebook are in the double digits (like 11 or so) and they still do not stop developing it. Sometimes the big G is weird.

ChromeOS has the stink of a developer brain child all about it. Specifically web developers who are forced to use inadequate languages and APIs to simulate a real native GUI and want to force all the other developers to suffer the same terrible fate. Or perhaps it is a bet, to see if they could make it work. Which unsurprisingly they cannot.

He's going to fully leverage the synergies they enjoy with their channel partners to cross-pollinate their talent pools, incentivizing them to push the envelope with out-of-the-box thinking tempered by routine touchbasing to keep their eyes on the prize and deliver shareholder value via continuous ideating vis á vis the focus issue of fragmentation.

I'd love if tomorrow Google would introduce a have a Chromebox with quad core ARM CPU that I can screw into the back of my monitor @ 99$/149$USD.

I don't like laptops. I like 24" monitors.

But then you would have a dumb terminal. Why would you want that if you could have the same system running Linux? If all they did was added a good keyboard/mouse interface to Android, it would still be much better than Chrome.

Chrome OS leaves me scratching my head. I don't understand why it exists as a separate product, instead of as a sub-development off of Android. The latter would seem to allow for a more unified pool of development talent, no?

EDIT: Removed previous joke as I misread Control Group's post somehow. (Whoops!) Thanks to Rene for pointing out my mistake.

They've been experimenting with how little it takes to satisfy consumers.

I don't know how well is Chrome OS selling but none of the people i know online and in life hear about Chrome or not interested. I assume is selling very poor. The google's best selling OS is definetely Android.

Well they don't actually sell Android so Chrome OS baked in is technically the only OS they are "selling" at all.

But then you would have a dumb terminal. Why would you want that if you could have the same system running Linux? If all they did was added a good keyboard/mouse interface to Android, it would still be much better than Chrome.

Because I have no interest in Android nor in a Linux desktop. I am invested in the web. The ChromeOS platform is very interesting and accelerating at a frantic pace.

Also I want an ARM quad core (Tegra 4?) WinRT PC that I can slap on the back of my monitor too.

I keep wishing they would integrate and have yet to hear a good reason why they don't. Anyone can see from the MS fumbling that integrating tablet features into a keyboard mouse setting are not a match made in heaven…

You may have answered your own question.

Quote:

… but if anyone could pull it off, its Google Apple.

Fixed, and they're not working on it either. Sure, there's some cross-pollination between iOS and OSX, but despite what some Chicken Littles may think, there are no plans to merge the two operating systems, and for good reason.